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2. Taxman May Now Go After Advertising Costs Of Consumer Goods Firms

The Directorate General of Goods and Services Tax Intelligence has initiated its investigation against consumer goods companies for claiming input tax credit on advertisements at point-of-sale display or retail stores, two people aware of the development told BloombergQuint.

5. JioPhone Users Have An Insatiable Hunger For Data

JioPhone, which became the best-selling device in its category in just a year of launch, has 25 million users. And each one of them on an average consumes 7 gigabytes of data a month, according to Anshuman Thakur, head of strategy and planning at Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.

Each JioPhone user consumes 10 GB a month on average compared to the industry average of 2 GB.

Data consumption jumped nearly ninefold since launch.

Consumer are discovering content on JioPhone, and average daily engagement on the feature phone is over five hours now, at a time when YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook aren’t available.

About 90 percent of the JioPhone users have migrated to the Rs 153 a month plan that offers 1.5 GB of data a day.

7. Another Asset Quality Review In The Works?

The Reserve Bank of India is in discussions with banks over another pool of stressed assets to check whether banks have classified them appropriately and provisioned adequately against them. The queries from the regulator follow a three-year long process of cleaning up bank balance sheets, which has led to reported bad loans across the banking sector rising to over Rs 10 lakh crore.

RBI has sent a list of stressed accounts to each bank individually and sought details regarding asset classification and provisioning.

Lenders are in the process of submitting their responses to the regulators’ queries.

The RBI will then assess the responses and decide on the future course of action required by the loan accounts.

The current round of assessment is focused more on provisioning than asset classification.

8. Additional Stamp Duty In Mumbai Has Developers Worried

Developers say the Maharashtra government’s move to levy an additional stamp duty on property transactions to fund infrastructure will hurt home sales in Mumbai even as they try to revive demand with discounts and freebies.

Maharashtra has proposed to levy a 1 percent surcharge on stamp duty.

This will make new houses more expensive.

Housing demand is yet to review from disruption by demonetisation and a new housing law.

The amount collected will be used to fund infrastructure projects in the city like metro and monorail.

10. The Spectacular Collapse Of A Private Equity Titan

Days before rubbing elbows with global business titans in Davos in January, Arif Naqvi set out to charm another circle of friends—Gulf Arab tycoons—in a last-ditch attempt to save his Dubai private equity firm. But things were already on the cusp of spiraling out of control. Dogged by allegations Abraaj had mismanaged investors’ money, Dubai’s star financier soon couldn’t pay the rent.

Naqvi surrendered control of Abraaj in June and it was then reveled that for many years its revenue didn't cover operating costs.

Abraaj was borrowing to fill the gaps and now owes over $1 billion to creditors.

The reliance on leverage created a “highly unstable” business model that's unusual for a the private equity industry.

Read more about Abraaj's fall and how it dealt a blow to Dubai's reputation.